Recent fuel economy tires tend to have high electrical resistance, and thus have the problem of a lack of safety, for example, ignition of fuel caused by sparks of static electricity in refueling a vehicle with these tires.
Patent Literature 1 addresses the above problem and teaches a tire including a conductive thin film to ensure conductivity, but this conductive thin film actually hinders the further improvement of fuel economy which has recently been desired. An effective alternative method for ensuring conductivity is to increase the gauge, but this method, too, deteriorates fuel economy and has another drawback of increasing the cost.
Also proposed is a method using a conductive carbon black as filler. This method unfortunately lowers tensile properties at break and flex cracking resistance because the carbon black, which is typically fine particles whose surface has low interaction with rubber, has poor dispersibility in rubber.